Many young storage administrators will probably find it hard to believe that once upon a time, disk drives were so expensive that company data was stored on disk only for the duration of the daily processing jobs. Permanent data was kept on cheaper media such as punched cards or tape reels.
SNIA introduces an ambitious new training program in cooperation with partners and vendors
I have been working mostly in my lab lately, resisting temptations to visit more shows or vendor sites. It's not that I don't like traveling (on the contrary, I enjoy it) but a few SAN arrays waiting for review had piled up in my lab and were making me feel guilty every time I walked by.
The old trusty (well, not that trusty) diskette may be officially dead, but I still have a few dozen or so lying around in my lab. Unfortunately, I can't toss them into the wastebasket yet because some still contain useful data, such as the bootstrap of full server backups.
Sometimes I feel for my fellow reporters who follow other beats. How disappointing it must be to wait for news that comes along in a slow drip, while I get a rainstorm about storage almost every day.
Two loosely related announcements grabbed my attention this week. Each introduces a new product that is a notable first-to-market for its manufacturer, but more importantly, these products mark a significant step up in storage. One technology doubles the disk drive capacity, while the other doubles the data transfer bandwidth.
Let’s face it; without IT, many business transactions such as managing production cycles, purchasing over the Web, or automating order management between buyers and vendors would not be possible. And without IT, we'd gain no economic benefits from automation, which allows companies to manage the same activities more efficiently, which in essence is doing more for less money.
The recent company acquisitions initiated by EMC remind me of the first moves in a chess games. Although everyone can clearly see each step, understanding their ultimate strategic objective is not always possible.
It’s easy to take storage capacity for granted, especially because there always seem to be constant improvements in disks and tape media. However, there is at least one class of storage devices that has not increased capacity at the same pace as the others.
If you haven't done your holiday shopping yet, get on it. I'm betting hi-tech gadgets will make a killing this year, with a good share of the money going to personal storage devices such as DVD recorders and external disk drives for PCs.
Keeping track of the number of acquisitions, mergers and alliances that occurred in the storage industry this year is no easy task. I admit to losing count a long time ago. And I'm way too lazy to figure this out, but I think this will be a record year for storage deals.
I spent one weekend this month putting my personal paper files in order. This meant spending a few hours shredding old bills and bank statements and moving payroll stubs and other IRS-sensitive documents to the tax folders. Boring? You bet. However, the predictably recurring chore helps keep my files at a manageable size, while preserving important documents such as last year's tax return.
Who do you go to when you need a really large tape library? Well, you only have a handful of options. ADIC, IBM, StorageTek and Sun are the only 'large' vendors that come to mind. And I'm defining 'large' as a library that is not fussy about OSes and supports concurrent requests from mainframe and open systems.
Let’s face it: The data we save to storage is ephemeral. At any time that data content can permanently change, often without warning and possibly without intention. In many ways, storing data to magnetic media is like writing in the sand -- easy to do but very short-lived.
By the time you read this column, Quantum should have made available its latest, most capacious and fastest tape unit to date. Of course, I'm speaking of the SDLT (super digital linear tape) 600, named after its impressive, single reel, 600GB capacity for compressed data.